Answered: How to Remove Facebook Reviews

Your reputation is everything. So when a negative or unfair review appears, it's important to know how to remove Facebook Reviews. Learn where to start with this guide.

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If you have a business, you know value of a good reputation. But in an increasingly digital world, online presence matters as much, if not more, than offline. So when a negative or unfair review appears on your favorite social network, it’s important to know how to remove Facebook Reviews.

What are Facebook Reviews?

These are simply customer reviews, which are posted to a business’s Facebook Page. Ideally, the reviews are positive, and they show other customers how good it can be to do business with you. The reviews are different from ratings and recommendations, as they tend to go more in-depth. This means that they can be more beneficial to your company…or they could be more damaging depending on the review.

There are going to be times when you will want to remove a review for one reason or another. It might be a fake review for example, or a spam review. It could also be entirely inappropriate, and it could be doing damage to your business. This type of review has the potential to damage your business. It doesn’t necessarily mean you are going to want to remove all reviews that could be construed as negative, though. More on this later.

How to Remove Facebook Reviews

When you find some reviews that you believe should be removed from your Facebook Page, you will want to flag them and notify Facebook. However, this is not always as easy as you might hope. In order for the Facebook team to check the review, it needs to be reported, and at this time, only reviews that have a comment on them can be reported. If the review doesn’t have a comment, it isn’t possible to flag and report it. This is true for any reviews, even if they are fake and from someone who has never done business with your company.

The Facebook help team has recommended that in the case of any negative review, including those that are fake, you should comment on them. Make your comment as though it were a real negative review. This way, it will have a comment and it can be flagged and reported. In addition, it will show others who see the review that your company took the effort to attempt to resolve the problem, and in most cases, the customers will overlook that review and not allow it to factor into their decision.

However, if you were to call out the fake or unfair review, it is going to cast your business in a negative light. It could cause people to not trust your business.

In addition to fake reviews, there are other types of reviews that you are likely going to want to remove, as well. These include spam reviews and inappropriate reviews. A spam review is not truly a review. It tends to be a thinly veiled advertisement for another type of product or service. Inappropriate reviews could be for entirely different products or services mistakenly added to your page, or they could be reviews that have foul language or violate Facebook’s Community Standards in some other way. As is the case with fake reviews, you will want to report them, but they can still only be reported if they have a comment attached to them.

Follow the same procedure as above by writing a comment and then reporting the review. The amount of time that it can take for the Facebook team to check on and remove the review will vary.

How to Hide Facebook Reviews

What if you decide you want to hide your Facebook Reviews altogether? The process for hiding reviews is a little different from removing them. Hiding your reviews does not delete them, instead, all reviews are hidden from your Facebook Page. Once you re-enable them, they will all return. This might be something that you want to do if you have a number of fake reviews and need to remove them permanently.

Here’s how you hide, or remove Facebook Reviews from your Facebook Page step-by-step:

Go to Settings on your Page

Click Edit Page

Scroll down until you find Reviews

Choose the Settings option (to the right of Reviews)

Turn Reviews off

Click Save

If you want to re-enable the reviews later, go back to the same location and turn them ON again.

Why You Might Not Want to Remove Negative Reviews

While there are going to be reviews you’d like to remove from your page, the truth is, negative reviews can have a seriously positive impact on your business. When you have some legitimate negative reviews on your page, it will show your potential customers and clients that you are authentic. By responding to those negative reviews, it’s also going to show them that you are proactive and responsive on social media.

Customers who read those reviews, along with your responses, will see that even negative experiences with the company are not so bad, and that they should still do business with you. For those who are still worried about negative reviews, you should consider using Podium. This can be a quality option to make it easier for you to get reviews.